torsdag 22. april 2010

Blippy cofounder overshares what his “Twitter for credit cards” is worth: $46.2M

Blippy, a social networking site that lets users share information about what they’re buying, has raised $11.2 million in new funding. The Palo Alto, Calif. company now has a post-money valuation of $46.2 million — pretty good for a service that only opened to the public in January.The news was first reported in TechCrunch. Cofounder Philip Kaplan confirmed to VentureBeat both the funding and the valuation. New investor August Capital led the round, with participation from Charles River Ventures, which incubated Blippy and led its seed round.The company’s basic concept, where users can automatically broadcast purchases from their credit cards, has drawn a fair share of skepticism. Is a credit-card statement something people really want to share? It’s still too early to know whether the idea can appeal to a mass audience. Kaplan did say Blippy’s user base is “growing pretty fast.” He declined to provide specific numbers, but pointed to traffic data from Compete showing 125,000 unique visitors in March and steady growth.Kaplan added that Blippy has been “listening to both our users and non-users” about how to make them more comfortable with the service. The team has already redesigned the site once, and among other changes has tweaked the process so users can approve each purchase before it’s shared. Most users still choose to share their data automatically, he said, though they might only show purchases from a specific credit card or website.

The company also plans to launch an application programming interface soon that will allow developers to use Blippy data in other web applications.Blippy has now raised a total of $12.8 million. It has 10 employees.“We’re going to keep things lean,” Kaplan said. “We will expand the team as needed. It gives us the freedom to be able to invest in expanding the site, expanding the services, marketing, business development.”Tags: oversharing, social sharing, TMICompanies: August Capital, Blippy, Charles River VenturesPeople: Philip Kaplan